The contagion effects around the collapse of FTX still cannot be gauged. The close ties within the crypto industry have caused even a reputable exchange like Gemini to run into trouble with withdrawals.
Genesis Global Capital, an institutional crypto lender, informed yesterday that it is “temporarily” suspending redemptions and new loan originations in its lending business. As a result, Gemini was also forced to pause its Earn program withdrawals, as Genesis Global is the lending partner.
In particular, the very awkward timing of a server outage, a few hours after the announcement, set alarm bells ringing in the crypto community.
The exchange assured users that customer funds were safe. “Gemini exchange fully back online; all customer funds held on the Gemini exchange are held 1:1 and available for withdrawal at any time,” it said.
Gemini The Next FTX? On-Chain Analyst Remain Calm
On-chain analysts therefore set out to review Gemini’s crypto holdings. Martin Lee, senior associate data journalist at Nansen examined the exchange’s ETH withdrawal address “0xd244.”
Lee found that the exchange saw a sharp retraction from investors on Nov. 16. In fact, Gemini faced 7.6 times the amount of outflows compared to inflows. Overall, the exchange saw a net outflow of around $500 million (in ETH and ERC20 tokens) in the last 24 hours.
Stablecoin balances on Gemini saw the second largest outflow within the last 7 days among all exchanges. The current balance of stablecoins has dropped from around $500 million to $149 million, or by $351 million.
As for Ether balances, the exchange has the 5th highest ETH balance among exchanges, just behind Kraken – 1.8 million ETH, which is about 7.98% of all ETH on exchanges.
Lee also looked at the “smart money flows” over the past 24 hours and found no “big moves,” with the biggest movement being $280K from Jump. Summing up, Lee said:
However, we clearly see Jump being the main entity doing withdrawals across various tokens.
On-chain analyst “Lookonchain” added to this observations that there were a total of 4,466 ETH withdrawals on Nov. 16, with 219,848 ETH – the equivalent of about $267 million – withdrawn. In total, 3,604 addresses withdrew their ETH from Gemini.
In addition, the analyst outlined that yesterday was not a significant anomaly. The withdrawal data of November 16 are about three times higher than those of November 15, November 14 and November 13.
Still, they were lower than on Nov. 12, “indicating that many retail investors withdrew ETH from Gemini yesterday,” the analyst said.
There is one notable address, according to the analyst. The address “0xc76c” has been withdrawing Ethereum from the exchange every day over the past week, totaling 63,888 ETH, the equivalent of about $77.4 million.
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Here are the top $ETH withdrawal addresses on Nov 16.
It is worth noting that the address “0xc76c” has withdrawn Ethereum from Gemini every day for the past week, and a total of 63,888 $ETH ($77.4M) has been withdrawn.https://t.co/yIOWEmQ8uN pic.twitter.com/1pwnf1Qsht
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) November 17, 2022
